Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Convention ear

Nanotechnology, which uses particles as small as atoms, is at best years away from producing commercially useful miniature machines.

But beyond the hype, nanotechnology is proving promising for medicine, anti-counterfeiting and other fields.

Here's a roundup of some of the products presented at the Small Times Nanocon convention last week at Mandalay Bay.

Fighting cancer with vibrating rust

Magnetic medicine sounds like a hoax, a scam, a radical cashectomy. A bracelet and a wink.

But if the techniques being researched by a German company win regulatory approval, magnets could soon be a real part of a promising cancer therapy.

Two caveats: You won't wear the magnets, and you will have to undergo a series of rust injections.

Well, basically rust: particles of iron oxide coated with aminosilane and dispersed in water. Injected into a tumor at multiple points, the iron, because of its coating, will stick to the spongy tumor tissue. Then the Germans slide the patient into a contraption that looks like an MRI machine with racing stripes. It doesn't image, though. It generates a magnetic field that rapidly switches polarity, which causes the rust to quiver like a teenager in love. Quivering, the rust heats up.

When it heats up, the tumor does too, essentially getting a nasty fever of between 108 121 degrees Fahrenheit. But only the tumor gets the fever and, researchers hope, dies. After the tumor breaks down, the rust is carried off through the bloodstream, where because of its coating it will linger harmlessly in the spleen for a while.

The magnetic treatment is so gentle that MagForce Nanotechnologies President Andreas Jordan said some patients fall asleep during it. It can also be used at the same time as conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

In clinical trials, one patient's brain cancer has been in remission for nearly three years, Andreas says.

MagForce hopes to win European Union approval for its therapy in the next year. Andreas is looking for a university or company to bring the technology to the United States.

Ensuring an honest pour

Counterfeit currency gets all the attention, what with the color-shifting Monopoly money redesigns, but who worries about bunko booze?

Multibillion-dollar international liquor conglomerates do. And when they do, Authentix is there for them.

The work it does for its undisclosed clients includes some of the standard anti-counterfeiting techniques used on cash money - invisible markings on the label and such - but it also puts nanoparticles into the hooch. The particles are ingestible, FDA approved and far too small to affect flavor. But they are detectable with a simple procedure that involves vials and strips not much more complicated than a home pregnancy test. A secret shopper can order a shot, surreptitiously siphon a bit off and, says CEO David Moxam, not only tell if it's the real McCoy but also if it has been watered down.

World's smallest lock-pick

If Brian Ruby - founder, CEO and whatever of Carbon Nanoprobes, Inc. - seems full of boyish enthusiasm, it's probably because he's only 22. But he's been working with carbon nanotubes since he was 15 and an intern at IBM, and that gives him seven years of experience in an infant industry.

Carbon nanotubes are pretty much what they sound like: really small tube-forms of carbon, notable for strength and conductivity. What Ruby hopes to do is manufacture a lot of them cheaply (no one is really doing that now) and use them to trace the outlines of the incredibly small.

Atomic force microscopes map and measure minute objects by dragging a very small point over its surface like a record-player's stylus. The smallest affordable styluses, silicon pyramids with 10 nanometer points, are too blunt to produce truly detailed images. Ruby's nanoprobes, attached to current styluses, could offer 10-times the resolution.

If he succeeds, Ruby's nanotube-tipped probes could revolutionize pharmaceutical research, allowing scientists to design drugs to interact with individual proteins.

"Imagine you have a chest of gold with a lock on it. You could try it with all of your keys, one at a time, millions of keys," Ruby said. "Or you could look inside the lock and know which key to use."

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